Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper offers a history of the embodied encounters of tourism through a reading of visual and verbal representations of Caribbean people by travellers and tourists, focusing on European and North American visitors to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The data is drawn especially from a genre of popular travel writing that emerged with the development of organised tourism in the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that the ways in which tourists and local people face each other, look at each other, hear each other, smell each other, or touch each other in these ‘close encounters of empire’, are all part of the power relations by which forms of gender and racial inequality are brought into being along with national boundaries of belonging and exclusion. Inasmuch as the body is a key site in the exercise of gender and racial domination and resistance, representations and deployments of Caribbean peoples’ bodies occur around deeply contested power relations, vested in the history of forms of bodily proximity that begin with the power dynamics of the master-slave relation and extend to contemporary forms of tourism and service work. Beyond the power of the tourist gaze, however, this paper also explores some of the forms of ‘returning the tourist gaze’ – that is, modes of resisting the power of the gaze to define one’s being.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper analyzes the intertwined projects of Third World development and tourism promotion in terms of their unequal social and spatial manifestations in a setting recently beset by transformative overhauls in this regard: Buenos Aires, Argentina. I train a comparative lens on three areas of the Argentine capital and their divergent paths of recovery from economic and political crisis (2001-2002) that have all adopted tourism as their survival strategy. I analyze the following differentiating axes for each urban area: (1) historical relationship to the local and national state, (2) predominant form of economic activity since international market opening in the 1990s, and (3) ethnic composition of area residents. The backdrop for this comparison is the documented boom in tourist entries since mid-2002 and the overarching tourism campaigns promoting the city since then, with the significant slogans of “Buenos Aires: Cultural Capital of Latin America,” and “Smile. We have visitors.” I find that older hierarchies of culture and place undergo reinvention in a conflictive politics of spatial claims that recasts the social cartography of the city for tourists and residents alike. By way of conclusion, I delineate the trajectories of those competing kinds of capital and their highly contingent resolutions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Lying Oracle Game is a two-person competitive game in which the first player wagers on the truth or falsity of statements that are made by the second player. Typically, the game is played for a finite number of turns, and the second player's ability to lie is subject to some constraint. Here I consider a generalization of the Lying Oracle Game, called the Tourist Game. In the Tourist Game, the second player is leading the first player through a strongly connected directed graph, and on each turn the first player wagers on which node they will visit next. Optimal strategies are identified, both for the finite-duration game and the infinite-duration game. I also consider the case in which the directed graph is not strongly connected, which leads to some interesting variants of the original Lying Oracle Game.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Despite growing evidence that much of the capital flowing into
tourism-based economies nurtures significant numbers of immigrants
returning to their home countries, it is easier to see natives as migrants
than as tourists. This paper draws on ethnographic research with Dominican
immigrant men, gay tourism entrepreneurs and websites devoted to gay
tourism to provide an initial map of the development of sex tourism
activities for the consumption of returning Dominican migrants and for
other men of color. By juxtaposing a variety of sources and actors, this
paper suggests that the interests of community activists and entrepreneurs
in New York and in the Dominican Republic converge in the commodification
of Dominican (straight) male bodies. This convergence may, in itself, not
be novel or unique to these populations. What is novel about this
development is the way in which the production and circulation of images
of Dominican male bodies by entrepreneurs and community leaders serve to
construct a “circuit of desire” connecting Dominican and other men of
color in northern Manhattan and the Dominican Republic. Although white gay
male sex tourists are not completely outside of the target audience of
this industry, the predominance of Dominican and other men of color
suggest that by becoming consumers and/or providers of sexual services,
various actors are renegotiating relations of inequality transnationally.
The convergence of LGBTQ organizing with gay sex tourism suggests that
this organizing is as invested in the formation of “modern” gay consuming
and mobile subjects and in the reproduction of the body of the Dominican
male sex worker as muscled, putatively straight, and immobile object for
consumption.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There has been a significant rise of the ‘service class’ worldwide today, which has been driven partly by the global significance of tourism. Today, Hong Kong’s service-oriented economy and vast consumer culture continue to accelerate in the age of rapid socio-economic integration into the Pearl River Delta region (PRD), resulting in a dynamic cultural belt. This paper focuses on tourist service providers as special ‘agents of cultural circulation’ whose occupations, work routines, cultural knowledge, social discourses, and self-identities are situated between the production and consumption of tourism, between supply and demand, ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic.’ It explores their significant role as ‘cultural intermediaries’ defined as a unique class of creative practitioners involved chiefly in the provision of symbolic goods and services.